Tag: Border Patrol

“Democracy Now!” hosts Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh discuss mass graves found in Brooks County, Texas, where many bodies were buried without identification in trash bags by a funeral home that charged taxpayers thousands of dollars.

Shena Gutierrez was already cuffed and in an inspection room in Nogales, Ariz., when the Customs and Border Protection agent grabbed her purse, opened it, dumped its contents onto the floor, and began to trample on her life, quite literally, with his black boots.

About 66 percent of the nation’s population lives in areas that have been militarized to the point of becoming “constitution-free” zones; a woman in Michigan shot herself in the face with a shotgun while trying to “make a point”; meanwhile, a former Mossad head warns that ISIS is already involved in Gaza and prompts Israel to continue negotiations with Hamas. These discoveries and more after the jump.

Immigration reform now seems certain to pass the Senate within days, in an amended bill that could win as many as 70 votes from both parties. The results will improve life for millions of undocumented workers and their families—but the costs will not be negligible.

The U.S. Border Patrol has caught some border crossers in remote stretches of desert with a sophisticated sensor mounted on unmanned spy aircraft that can reveal every man, woman and child under its gaze from a height of about 25,000 feet.

Taking a page right out of “Star Wars,” California-based aerospace manufacturer Aerofex has released video showing a kind of “hover bike” maneuvering through the desert in scenes that resemble Luke Skywalker’s dashes through the Tatooine wilderness on his X-34 Landspeeder.

The U.S.-Mexico border was the “line of scrimmage” and the rest of the world a football field inside the brightly-lit convention hall in Phoenix, where hundreds of salespeople peddling their border-enforcement products and national security wares were scrambling for an edge in the exploding markets of border patrol and social control.

Who would have thought the comprehensive immigration reform promised by President Obama would include a whopping $600 million for increased security along the U.S.-Mexico border for surveillance technologies and 1,000 more Border Patrol agents?

Seemingly taking a cue from Iraqi anti-insurgency manuals, U.S. border agents opened fire on a man as he attempted to drive through the border checkpoint at the Tijuana-San Ysidro crossing, fleeing officials after he failed to present legal identification.

Pastor Steven Anderson of Tempe, Ariz., says he was Tasered, assaulted and denied medical treatment after he refused to submit to a search by Border Patrol officers at an immigration checkpoint east of San Diego. The ACLU has called the area a “Constitution-free zone” where such abuse has become commonplace.